


Forsaken of Earth

by kiddywonkus



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, tw: miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 13:48:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/762031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiddywonkus/pseuds/kiddywonkus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The 456 are back, and this time they're taking more than their ten percent.</p><p>A COE make-it-worse fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forsaken of Earth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Orangejuicepony](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Orangejuicepony).



> A friend made mention that there are always COE fix-it fics, but no COE make-it-worse fics (aside from Miracle Day, supposedly).
> 
> So, orangejuicepony, this is for you. And honestly, in a world that makes more sense, this is probably exactly what happened after Children of Earth. After all, why would the 456 leave forever? They have more technology, and the only reason they were using children to communicate was because it was probably easier to zap them up en masse if the government just gave them to them.

              The first thing that gets to him, that always gets to him, is the smell. A jumble of rust, mold and fear, it lingers in his mouth even when he leaves the bunker. But then again, everything about the bunker stays with Jack. As he walks the hushed, empty streets of Cardiff, he can still hear the shivers of breath, and the echoing whimpers of children in his ears.

             Jack finds Alice’s house almost the way she left it,  the once meticulously clean interior now covered in a  half-inch layer of dust.

            Where Alice went, and where she is, is a mystery.  These days, Jack has a hard time remembering she was even there at all. It's a reminder of how things are these days. Sometimes he knows where Gwen is, but most of the time he doesn't. He always knows where Ianto and Steven are, and he tries to take comfort in that.

            For his grandson's sake, it is far better to be swept up in a vain attempt to save the world then to be huddled in fear in one of the bunkers, eating stale raspberry flapjacks, praying that this will not be the day the 456 comes. He doesn't know how he feels about where Ianto is, or rather, isn't. All the bodies in the Thames house had been burnt, and their ashes spread in an undisclosed location. The only grave Jack has for Ianto is the Tomb for the Unknown Warrior now. Had he had to live his life over again, Steven, his twelve year old grandson would still have died. But Ianto, he would have kept him from coming at all.

 

           It wouldn't have mattered. He would have had to say goodbye to Ianto anyway because there was no way the other man would forgive him for what he did to Steven. But at least... at least he would be alive.

           Jack had been planning on leaving Earth. No. He was going to leave it. He couldn't stay when every inch of the planet felt like a grave, and could almost feel the bones of all those he loved or would have loved crushed beneath his feet.  When the 456 came, all transmissions were blocked. The Hub is gone, along with all the alien technology. Jack, he finds, is doomed to walk the Earth until the 456 leave. When that would be, he doesn't know, but he assumes it will be when all the children are gone.

 

 

* * * 

            Gwen doesn't remember much these days, if only because it’s hard to know, in the sewers, when one day ends and another begins. She woke up one night, her abdomen convulsing in pain, and a puddle of blood growing between her legs. After that, she had no trouble categorizing her life: before the miscarriage, and after.

 

            They tell her it was stress, and she spends whatever time she can find alone sobbing with her back against the cold stone, not because of the loss, though she feels that keenly, but because she is glad. And it is that thought that she can’t stomach at all. Sometimes, the grief and guilt would roll her, like a wave in a storm, and she would have to dodge away from the group of children to vomit.

            It feels like she's pregnant again.

            Rhys rarely speaks anymore. It is like the veil has been lifted, and he knows that the life he had planned on, the one before Torchwood, before the 456, before the miscarriage, is never going to happen. He never touches her anymore, and she doesn't ache for it. Now, they go weeks without even talking.

            He never says it, but Gwen knows. She was happy about the miscarriage and it made him angry. It is that simple truth that lies between them, a stone wall as impenetrable as Troy. 

            Every time Gwen thinks about leaving him, the guilt, and the acid taste that starts in the back of her throat, stops her, even when she can’t bear to even look at him anymore.

 * * *           

            Before the 456 returned, Alice walked the world like a ghost, haunting every place her son had ever smiled in, tracing her fingertips along the paths they used to walk.

            She used to feel sick when she saw other children, and then, more disturbingly, she felt rage. She’d have to clench her hand into a fist, and bite her nails into her palms just to keep from hitting one on the street. When she wakes up in the middle of the night, she is surrounded by the strident scream of her only son, and somehow feels the heavy weight of his body in her arms.

            Her son. Her beautiful boy. A boy who was only special because he was there. The boy her own father had killed for the good of the world.

 

            And what good it did.

            The 456 came back, and this time without warning. There were no calls of “we are coming” the next time they came; just parents finding empty beds; no one knowing what had happened. The second time… people began to guess. The third? Well, it doesn’t matter what they thought. They know it’s the 456 now.

            They fourth time they come, Alice decides to stop being a ghost. She leaves her house, and works her way into the underground networks of children, all of them orphans, hiding in dank, and dirty places. Their hideouts only last so long before the locations are compromised, and she is constantly on the move.  They make it as far as Birmingham when the 456 actually attack.

            When this happens, Alice splits up from the group, intending to be a diversion.She doesn’t know if it works or not. She can hear her heart beating so loud she thinks it will betray her position. It’s too dark to see in the alleyways, and she falls down in potholes in the gravel more than she runs. What she does know is that dodging into an abandoned convenience store is a bad idea the second the smell of something reminiscent to burning plastic drifts through the air.

 

            Is is too late. She already breathed the air. Her lungs constrict, and she falls to the ground, her knees cracking against the tile loudly.

            Slowly, as she loses the ability to takes in air and her body starts to shut down, she wonders if she even managed to save a single child.

* * *           

            Rhiannon had a funeral for her brother Ianto a week after the 456 left. She does not have one for her daughter.

            Instead, she sits listlessly at the kitchen table, staring at the door, as if Mica will open it, and run in with a silly grin on her face as she throws her schoolbag on the sofa.

           No one knew what the 456 did with their children. There were rumors, of course. They all sound unreal, and exaggerated, but Rhiannon doesn’t discount a single one of them. The rumor that scares her most is the one where the children are used as drug slaves, but it also gives her hope that Mica is still alive.

            Upstairs, Johnny is hung over. Soon enough, he’ll be drunk again, and then he’ll fall asleep. He rarely smells of anything but stale sweat anymore, and Rhiannon doesn’t even sleep in the same bed as him. She only sleeps in Mica’s room, and she clings to the sheets that she won’t wash. She pretends they still smell like her youngest daughter when she knows they haven’t done so in weeks.

 

             After Mica disappears, Rhiannon puts the house on lock down, and forbids David to leave. What good, if any, it will do, she doesn’t know. After all, Mica had been bodily transported from her bed in the middle of the night.

            Since the 456 came back, the estates transformed. No longer lively, and loud, but squalid places that huddle against one another waiting for the next attack. The quiet of their home is constantly broken by her sobs, Johnny’s retching, and David ‘s yells. When her son gets really mad, he throws things. The television in the living room now bares a long crack down the middle from when he threw his game controller at it.

            One morning, Rhiannon sleeps too late and she doesn’t hear David sneak out the backdoor in the early hours after dawn. She doesn’t know if he was taken, or if he left, and for some reason, it hardly matters to her anymore. The pain is too much, and she slips into shock.

* * * 

            PC Andy Davidson gives up. One day, he shuts off his mobile and doesn’t come into work. Instead, he lets himself exist, if only barely, during the seconds the  _Countdown_  clock ticks. He leaves the house when the news comes on to buy a bottle of lager and six hour old samosa languishing on a hotplate. Sometimes he purchases a bag of crisps too.

            The only time he leaves his flat these days is when the news is on. It’s nothing but the faceless numbers of children that have disappeared, followed by stories over which continent they believe the 456 are orbiting. Then they report on parents who bargain other people’s children in exchange for their own children’s safety, and it’s this last story that makes him sick; the one that makes him hang up his uniform jacket in the back corner of his closet and shut the door.

 He can’t stop it. He tried. He watched a “bargained” child in a jail cell disappear in a jet of flame before he could even put his hand on the door.

            So, Andy gives up and watches reruns of  _Coutdown_ and  _Eastenders_.

 

* * * 

            The few people alive on Earth who know who The Doctor is wait. They call. They leave messages. They plead.

            UNIT Headquarters lies in ruins, and corpses rot in every building, a grim reminder of the awesome power of the 456’s chemical weapons. Still, The Doctor doesn’t come.

            Jack knows, the way Martha won’t let herself admit, that this must be fixed. That there is nothing they can do, and he wonders why it’s never mentioned in his history books.

            The few people alive on Earth who know who The Doctor is wait. They hope. It is all they have.

            The Doctor never comes.


End file.
